A to Z guide for student engagement with Swift Polling

One of the most common problems faced by teachers is how to keep their students focused, eager, and concentrated throughout a lesson.

It is quite challenging to keep students engaged behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively and to positively affect their learning and achievement.

Some researchers claim that students have an attention span of 10-12 minutes. Taking this into consideration, we can understand why some students find it hard to stay concentrated during a class that lasts 45-90 minutes.

Happily, there are a lot of innovative tools that help teachers solve this problem. One of those tools, which is already included in different teaching strategies, is Swift Polling. This is a real-time polling app that helps educators engage their students and make their classes more fun and interactive. Hundreds of teachers from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are already using this tool and sharing their positive feedback.

Here are some examples that will help you understand Swift Polling’s importance in the classroom and why it is an integral part of student success.

Educational quizzes

Having general knowledge is a must for students. In order to check their awareness about different important topics, you can create fun and educational quizzes once a week. Try to create a quiz with increasingly difficult questions, provide several options and see who’s gets the most points. Here’s a fun quiz example with 12 questions, check it out yourself to understand better what needs to be done.

Opinion sharing

There are always some shy students who have difficulty expressing themselves in front of the class. Swift Polling makes it easier for students to share their opinions by using text messages. All you need to do is to create an open-ended question with Swift and ask your students to send their responses through their smartphones (they all have them, right?). You will be surprised by the number of students who are eager to share their opinions but were being hidden because of their fear of public speaking.

Class evaluation

In order to improve classroom management, it will be useful for teachers to get some feedback from their students. But for some students, it seems risky to share their real thoughts because they don’t want their honest opinion to negatively affect their relationship with their teacher. Fortunately, Swift Polling gives them the opportunity to do it anonymously. If you want to improve your classes and get some healthy feedback, create a student survey and ask your students to answer it with their mobile devices. You will see the aspects that you need to work on and they will not be afraid to express themselves – a win-win.

Swift Polling is super easy to use. You just need to follow these three steps:

1. Create any number of polls and then activate the one you want your students to vote on.
2. Present your poll on any screen and let them vote by text or online.
3. Provide real-time updated results from within your presentation and spark a fully inclusive conversation.

This century is all about technology. Let’s use it wisely and watch ourselves revolutionize the educational system.